A committee of MPs has criticised the Ministry of Justice over its £4 million-a-year lease for HMP Dartmoor.
The cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has published a report on the deal. It found that HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) made “poor commercial decisions which resulted in a needless waste of taxpayers’ money”.
Dartmoor can hold up to 600 men but has stood empty since August 2024. Levels of radon, a radioactive gas, inside its buildings exceed legal safety limits.
Lease signed despite radon history
According to the committee, HMPPS signed a new lease for the site in 2022. It did so even though it knew the prison had recorded high radon levels two years earlier. The report says HMPPS then failed to carry out further full radon testing.
HMPPS argued that the prison capacity crisis had left it in urgent need of places. The PAC said it “does not accept” that explanation.
The report adds that HMPPS failed to negotiate a matching cut in the annual rent. Nor did it secure safeguards against the financial risk of rising radon levels. Under the contract, HMPPS cannot end the lease until at least 2033. Over that period it must also pay £68 million in improvement costs.
No clear plan for the site
The committee wants HMPPS to set out the lessons it has drawn from failures in its decision-making and contract management. It also found that neither the MoJ nor HMPPS had clear plans for Dartmoor’s future. Both had earlier assured the committee that they aimed to bring the prison back into safe use.
The inquiry found that the two bodies are now less certain that reopening Dartmoor offers the best value for money. The report urges them to agree a plan first. They should then decide whether to keep spending money on an empty prison. The alternative is to seek an early exit from the lease, the report says. That would mean a full commercial negotiation with proper professional advice.
The decision to extend the contract came in 2022, before a survey showed the need for mitigation. The view at that time was that the need for the prison’s 600 places outweighed any cost issues. Talks with the Health and Safety Executive on ways to reopen the jail are continuing.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson noted that the decision dated from 2022. “This Government inherited a crisis in our prisons system, where prisons were on the brink of collapse, threatening a total collapse in law and order,” the spokesperson said. The Government was tackling the crisis by building 14,000 new prison places and through the Sentencing Bill, the spokesperson added.
Dartmoor is one of the oldest prisons in the UK. It opened in 1809 to hold French prisoners captured in the Napoleonic wars. It became a grade II listed building in 1987. The prison stands on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, and its rent goes ultimately to the Prince of Wales.
The prison is a category C jail for men in the South West. Its last full inspection before the report took place in October 2023. Inspectors rated safety as reasonably good and respect as not sufficiently good. They judged purposeful activity to be poor, and rehabilitation and release planning to be reasonably good.
